The Most American Week Ever

It's been a rough week for America and if you don't know why, you need to read this more than most. Or, if not this, then almost anything other than your heavily curated Facebook feed. But I'll assume that you do know why, and that you, too, are hurt and angry and disoriented by the violence and pain in our nation over the last several days...or decades...or centuries, depending on your point of view.

I'll assume that, like me, you want a better America than the one you've seen on television or out your window, or through your own experiences. I'm going to, for the sake of this one-sided discussion, begin with the assumption that you are both proud to be an American and willing to make that mean something greater than it already does. It's a decently large set of assumptions, but I think we're all up to that challenge.

I've seen and heard multiple versions of the comment, "this isn't my America" or "what is this country coming to?" --not just in reference to this last week, but also during our incredibly weird election cycle and never-ending spate of mass shootings. But I actually think this week may be the most American week we've had in a long time.

The major news stories of this week have involved police shootings of minorities, a suicidal/homicidal soldier, mental illness, death of police officers, peaceful protest, arrest of protesters, and, as is increasingly common, the proliferation of guns. If we could throw in immigration (although one of the fallen Dallas officers was, in fact, Mexican-American) and a privileged white guy getting away with campus rape we'd probably have the crux of every news story of the last year.

There is chaos and tension and blood. As disturbing as that is, it's not exactly new.  From our violent beginnings in the Revolution to the Civil War that nearly broke America's back...from the gang riots of immigrant groups in New York to the violence of Bloody Kansas...from the Civil Rights Movement to border wars no matter where our border might have been at the time.., the pain and the violence and the continually readjusting to a new normal, a new people group, and a new way of doing our lives has always been present.

It is, in fact, the most amazingly beautiful thing about the American Experiment--that we can face the inevitable clashes that come with living in close proximity to those with whom we do not feel related and find some common ground to stand on anyway.

When I taught AP World History to 10th graders, one of the tasks they needed to learn was to answer Document Based Questions. They were given a set of historic documents and expected to draw conclusions about the time and place in which the document was made. To be honest, most of them were very bad at it, especially at first. They continually wanted to use the documents (ships' logs, photographs of pottery fragments, royal decrees) as they would an encyclopedia.

They wanted to believe what they could see in front of them was absolute fact.

Over time, and with a lot of practice, they learned to always, always look at the source first. Was that ship's log made by a captain for his own use or to hand over to his investors or boss? Was that pottery used by an everyday citizen or was that something only elites had access to? Did the king have the power to enforce that royal command or was it just for show? Who, what, when, where, why, and how--those interrogatives you learned if you ever took a journalism course--became the bedrock of understanding historical events.

In order to accurately assess what happened in any given moment, students had to put themselves in someone else's shoes...to imagine their motivations and experiences...their worldview and sphere of influence..instead of looking at it solely from the students' own points of view. Although not all students became equally proficient at this task, every single kid I ever taught about sourcing a document got better at it over time. Every single one. Every single time.

I wish I could lead courses for adults to teach this skill (because it is absolutely a skill) and use current news articles as our documents. There are kind, well-meaning people who are completely clueless when it comes to thinking about life outside of themselves. And our social media obsessed society makes it so much easier to look like an insensitive moron. These social issues--race relations, policing, mental illness--they don't lend themselves to 140 characters or a snap shot.

I understand the desire to say something, anything, when there is pain...but your Insta-ready white family's pic at the beach in Seaside stating that you "stand with your African-American brothers and sisters" doesn't hit quite the right note. Find some actual humans with brown skin to stand next to when they need a friend, not when you need a "black friend."

If you commented that "perhaps some good will come from this" after the assassination of police officers, you clearly aren't related to any cops. Only victims, of any race, of any crime, of any profession, get to look for the silver lining. Bystanders should bring blankets and water and hugs and only say, "I'm sorry."

If, every time there's a mass shooting, you post that the problem isn't with guns, but crazy people with guns and we really just need to "fix" our mental health system, you just prove that you don't know anything about mental illness. I know about both guns and mental illness and only one of those things can be locked up in a safe.

If you post passive-aggressive messages about the "sanctity of the family" even if you don't ever actually say anything about gay people, your gay friends and relatives read between the lines even if you really didn't "mean it that way." Stop that.

If you post that you "support our troops" but don't bother to learn that Memorial Day and Veteran's Day are two different events (neither one of which is about active-duty soldiers), your thanks sounds kind of hollow. Same goes for complaining about your out-of-town husband on Facebook when you have a military spouse as a friend.

Social media is fun and interesting, but it is far more about blips of information than about relationships and understanding.  Your one comment about a complex issue is never all you think and feel about the topic and you know it...let's all try to imagine what it might sound or look like to the people we love who might be listening.  Save the other comments for face-to-face conversations.

If you want meaningful social media, go ahead and follow DeRay and the Dallas PD and the White House and Mitt Romney and It Gets Better and Focus on the Family. If you don't want political social media, that's cool, too. Stick to food and vacay pics and we can all keep following each other and looking at each others' kids.

But in real, actual life, this is my proposal:

Find someone you're afraid of and love on them, without ever expecting anything in return. We owe it to our children to get this right.

Go to a police station and take some food at a random time. Cops work weird hours and they're hungry.

Ask a woman in a head scarf at the gym how her holidays have been. Can you imagine the dedication to fitness it takes to work out with your head covered?

Talk to a gay coworker about their kids. Gay people have kids sometimes and they love theirs just as much as you love yours.

Learn how to both pronounce AND spell the names of your neighbors from India.  It may not sound "American", but that's o.k., you can do it.

Listen when your classmates and coworkers and friends from church with brown skin say you don't have any idea what it's like to be black in America. Because you don't. And I don't. But we can both learn a little bit more every day.

I'm going to be honest...if we do this right...if we do this well, it's gonna get real awkward. You might say something ignorant and feel dumb. You might mispronounce a holiday or misunderstand a comment. You might ramble like I do.

I'm still feeling stupid about the rant I went on about the treatment of the history of enslaved people at Mount Vernon---to African-American friends of Jay's I had never met before. (Uh, if you guys read this...sorry, y'all. My mouth works faster than my brain sometimes. Hope it wasn't weird.)

We're going to have to get over the strangeness and love each other anyway. And listen. And learn. And be generally uncomfortable. It won't kill us, but it might just save us.

I, like a lot of people who like both music with great beats and Revolutionary history (I'm assuming there's more than just me), have been singing the songs from the Broadway musical Hamilton. It's amazing and you should listen to it right after this if you haven't already. There's one song with the refrain, "when are these colonies gonna rise up?" It's about actual, violent rebellion, but the story of Hamilton is also about rising beyond the violence to get to something better. One of Lin-Manuel Miranda's lines (as Alexander Hamilton) is "for the first time I'm thinkin' past tomorrow." It's about achieving freedom and equality and hope and opportunity without burning the house to the ground in the process. It's about change for the present in hope for the future.

Conflict in America is not new. When this many different groups of people live together it will never be "over," merely always evolving. But this IS America--to rise up, rise on, rise through. To forge better and truer, stronger and braver not in spite of, but because of our differences.

So sing along everybody, "when are these colonies gonna rise UP, rise UP?" We can do it together. 

What It's Like to Travel with Four Kids

The short answer: It is amazing. In every possible way one can be amazed. By joy, by discovery, by time spent together; by sunsets and nature and adventure. And also by whining and chaos and uber-closeness and vomit. Really, truly, amazing.

Last year we embarked on a new life journey that we are still exploring and figuring out and touching tenderly like when you have a sore spot in your mouth you keep poking with your tongue. Part of that journey is a family mission to spend the night in all 50 states. These are our own arbitrary rules, but all 6 of us have to spend the night and do something iconic for the state to count. So, my layover in Minneapolis does not count as having been to Minnesota. That time I drove a snowmobile on a frozen river in Alaska counts for me, but not the whole family. When the whole family camped in one 4-man tent in Yellowstone and managed to suffocate a small rodent under our tent at night, that felt like we pretty much covered Wyoming. You get the idea.

In the last little-more-than-a-year (we started in February, 2015), we've been to 35 states including Georgia. And it really has been amazing. I get a lot of questions about how we "do that with four kids," but honestly, I do everything with four kids so you just kind of get used to it.

I know what people mean, though. They want to know what it's like to schlep through the airport or ride in the car for hours every day or to be in a new hotel every night. They want to know how we keep that many personalities happy and relaxed on vacation (we don't, so don't expect that miracle piece of information). They want to know if it's something they might be able to do (or want to do) with their own kids. So, here's what it's been like so far. I'll let you know what it's like again after we get those last 15.

Really Inconvenient
Everything about having children is crazily inconvenient. It takes for-freaking-ever to get in and out of cars. And in and out of hotels. And in and out of restaurants. If we fly, we travel with car seats that we take through security and onto the airplane. People sometimes groan out loud when they see us coming. Strangers will comment on our children--sometimes with "you're doing such a good job with them" (usually from old people) and sometimes "are they ALL yours?" (usually from anyone else).

Kids get hungry and tired and irrational and don't always get the significance of what they're doing.

This is the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia. See how thrilled the kid on the left is?

Where the Wright Brothers Invented Flight. Nailed the family photo. 

It is totally inconvenient to schedule and go and shake up anything about the systems in place to function that we have at home. We go anyway. With children who are at times irritable and ungrateful and grumpy--because we are a family team and life wasn't going to be much more convenient at home anyway.

Unpredictable
Travel is kind of unpredictable no matter who you take with you. Hotels are not always as great as they seemed online. The new town you're in may not have anything your kids like to eat. We never know when someone might melt down, need to go potty, decide they're having a terrible time, or just plain rebel against an activity.  There's more crying in the airport than when we go places without kids. There're a lot more bathroom stops. We also don't know where we're going a lot of the time and that makes the whole thing unpredictable.

Instead of being a negative, though, I think it's good for the kids. They see us have to make decisions based on new information and new problems. We've changed hotel rooms while driving down the freeway because we realized we could get further than we thought and we'd rather drive less tomorrow. We've had to use real, actual maps because cell service doesn't work everywhere in the nation (especially near national parks).

Actual map of Montana--see how there's no blue dot for my car?

Life is unpredictable and this is a pretty fun way to practice making decisions on the fly and negotiating with loved ones and communicating when we're tired and hungry and stressed. Jay and I get frustrated, but we're stuck in the car or the hotel and the kids get to see us work it out without ruining the day.

Gross
Children are disgusting. For that reason I travel with an elephant's worth of Wet Ones and hand sanitizer. This is so ingrained in my daughter that she pulled hand sanitizer out of her purse at church today when they got a snack. We've had vomit in the car more than once (different kids, different trips) and diarrhea in the car once. That was not good.  We have had children with enough sand to start building a hurricane barrier in their shorts and a flight to catch in an hour (poor parent decision making there--and also why I wound up in an outdoor shower with a Russian man and a naked toddler). We have had loveys left in horrible places, rubbed all over hotel room floors, and then kissed profusely when they were found. Seriously. Super gross.

Aah-Aah the Monkey was found in the parking lot of The Big Texan Steak House (home of the 72oz steak) underneath two guys smoking in the parking lot in Amarillo, Texas. At least as gross as it sounds.

Embarrassing/Conspicuous
We do not enter any location unnoticed. We take up the entire escalator at the airport. And the entire elevator in hotels. We are not quiet. We are not stealthy. We were asked to leave the tour at Independence Hall, laughed at (good-naturedly) by retirees in line at the National History Museum in D.C., and directly addressed by TSA agents in Atlanta, Seattle, and LA. So many people comment on our four kids (it's not like it's 40, people) that I don't even notice it most of the time anymore. A Japanese man and I had a conversation in broken English outside Yellowstone Lodge about how I did, in fact, give birth to them myself. Mostly I find this hilarious, but it certainly takes more bravado than I expected.

What we take on an airplane. Not subtle.

Sometimes it's our own fault. It was really funny to have an Elvis wedding (actually a vow renewal--we have been married for quite a while) in Vegas. I did not, however, anticipate how much courage it took to walk through the lobby of Paris Las Vegas wearing my veil and followed by the children. I was told congratulations, so that was nice. But definitely not low key.

Headed to our Vegas wedding in a rented KIA minivan. It smelled better than our own minivan, so that was luxurious. 

Terrifying
Sometimes, where we go is just plain terrifying. There's a fence at the Grand Canyon, but it's made out of chain link like the one we had that couldn't keep our dog in when I was growing up. And there are gaps. Giant, child-sized gaps. The Tidal Basin in DC has no rail or fence and it was really crowded with wall to wall people down to the very edge. Crater Lake had a thin guide wire strung between two trees that was the difference between standing on actual rock and standing on snow cornices. The ranger there said, "Be careful here because it slopes downward before the rope. If you start sliding, you will die."

View from Hoover Dam. See how we did NOT get the kids in this shot?

New Orleans has lovely trolleys, but they are located in the middle of the street so there's about a 5 foot gap between child-killing traffic and child-killing trolleys. We've driven on roads that had us white knuckling the steering wheel and drugging the children with iPads to ensure silence. Hoover Dam...yeah, both sides of that were horrifying. So, it's frightening. And I kind of like that.

Walkways with absolutely no rails over the geothermal features in Yellowstone. Some also have water in them, not just earth fire.

Educational
Sure it is educational in the actual history way. We've learned a crazy amount about Lewis and Clark and the Civil Rights Movement and the American Revolution.  We've learned about Westward Expansion and Pilgrims and the Civil War. But we've also learned how other people live and how big our country is and how much of it still doesn't have people in it. And yet, at the same time, how many other people there are living lives parallel to our own thousands of miles away.

Fort Sumter, where the Civil War began. Our kids are wearing gloves (that they would lose five minutes later) because it was the one day in Charleston that it got cold. Also, can you see the 4th kid? Another perfect pic. 

We learn about each other and what we find interesting. We learn our children's personalities in new and unusual circumstances. We learn how to communicate with each other better because there's no where to escape and the children can always hear us. We learn how to entertain ourselves for hours on end of driving and staring out of the window. We learn...and for my teacher soul that is so very satisfying.

Very, Very Precious
For all the embarrassment and inconvenience and uncertainty and vomit, I am so very glad we are on this silly mission. It is so much fun. Life itself is one very big adventure filled with all of these qualities--what an amazing way to get to teach our kids how to roll with it. What an amazing series of moments to share. This past week we took another rented KIA minivan 3 miles down a dirt road off a crazy curvy highway in California to find a stand of redwood trees. We were the only people there when we arrived--it was about 5pm and getting dark and misty. The sunlight filtered through the giant trees and the rain chilled us a little and the only sounds were our kids (of course) and the nearby river. We found a spot where giant logs lay in a semi-circle underneath towering trees and I could not help but think that it looked like the kind of church that God himself had made. So we made our own family circle and prayed in that sacred place...thanking God for the sky and the trees and the river and the rain and the chance to see them all together.

Boys and a giant tree. KIA minivans can go anywhere.

This is why now, with my jet-lagged children irritable and grumpy and picking at each other after the let-down of home again and back to routine, I'm already planning the next trip.  No matter what happens on our trips, what lives up to our dreams and what doesn't, it was always absolutely worth it because we are on the adventure together. I can't wait to see what the next one brings.